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Endlessly Curious
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein
I found myself laughing as I read this quotation because Albert Einstein made such great contributions to the world: no special talent? Then I realized that I was moved by his comment because it spoke for me and I expect for many others. Curiosity can be my best friend at times, leading me into exciting and unexplored directions.
Like Einstein (only more so!) I don’t think I have a special talent. I do a number of things fairly well, but I will not be a person who changes the world. Instead, I am a person of curiosity.
Those of us who are curious know it feeds our souls. Whether we are relentless in our pursuit of understanding the world and how things work; or whether we are infinitely curious about how people think or act the way they do, curiosity emboldens us, motivates us and engages us in the world. Those who are curious won’t settle for being observers, passively watching life pass by, without asking questions or wondering “why.”
On Ricochet, we are possibly the most curious people around! We want to know what others think, how they reach their conclusions and discuss how we reject their opinions or embrace them. We’ve spent weeks trying to get our arms around the coronavirus, for example, working with each other to comprehend the trends, the graphs, and the numbers, and analyzing the activities and decisions of government, as well as trying to understand human nature. We ask incessantly why and how we have arrived at this point and where we should go next. You might say it is in the DNA of Ricochet.
We are endlessly curious and it serves us well.
Published in Group Writing
One of the things I have noticed is that ongoing sustained curiosity leads many of us to see a much longer-term time horizon than do others. For the Wuhan Flu, for example, we at Ricochet were trying to figure out both treatments and herd immunity weeks and even months before politicians or the media got there.
So true! It is the narrow, short-sighted viewers that have made errors, just to have some kind of answers to shush the protesting crowds. Patience with determination must be built into our efforts, and those are hard for many to meld.
Curious or busybodies? Which gives me the opportunity to do a lateral pirouette to share a brief anecdote: Mrs Rodin and I were watching some commercial for something totally forgettable (by me). She turned to me and said, “What is a ‘lifestyle coach’?” To which I responded, “They used to be called ‘busybodies’.”
Aw, I don’t know about that. There are certainly people who are busybodies, but they are easy to pick out. Lifestyle coaches are selected by clients to help people determine direction in their lives; I think they can be helpful if the clients are open to change. Busybodies are those who ask questions that are none of their business. For example no one on Ricochet has asked me more than I’ve written about my medical condition beyond what I’ve shared. I think they realized that if I wanted to share more (and I probably already shared too much for some!), I would have written about it. Some people will ask more and mean well, but when a person refuses to share more, they are fine. If you refuse a busybody, he or she would go off in a huff as if somehow entitled to that information, since I “opened the door.” Too bad!
Thanks!
It is interesting that you and I took Einstein to mean such different things, and that the way we view his life is so different.
You and I have so much in common, but there is at the same time a profound difference between the way we look at the world, and our respective reactions to this wonderful quote expose it perfectly.
Often, long-married husbands and wives have become curious and more aware of the differences between the female and male mind. Then we start to look for sex differences to explain some odd things that we see. (Sometimes we surely see more than is there, and the psychologists could straighten us out.)
Anyway, along those lines: It makes me think that the X chromosome, which we each have, contains more of the DNA for pragmatical curiosity, and the Y chromosome contains more of the DNA for curiosity unbent to the demands of pragmatism.
I can’t explain this nagging thought–I just record it here to get it off my mind, not in the hope that anyone else will have a clue what I’m talking about. I think folks around here are accustomed to reading incomprehensible posts by me ;-)
Ahhhhhh, that’s better . . .
Sure resonates with me Susan. This is what I placed on my Ricochet profile when I signed on:
Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. . . . Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.” This resonates with me. I’m a wannabe pilgrim explorer.
A previous Quote of the Day on Einstein (shameless plug) also discussed his relatively deprecating nature later in life. Another famous Einstein quote:
The Special Theory of Relativity, where a clock slows down and a body contracts in the direction of motion, comes from Einstein reconciling Newtonian mechanics to Maxwell’s equations. A great discovery, nevertheless.
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Last night I looked up the relationship between testosterone and the strength of one’s immune system. It’s not good. No wonder the good guys die young, especially with Covid-19.
Good thing I’m old, then . . .
That’s a good one… may I “borrow” it?
Curiosity is the prerequisite for learning and knowledge. I remember being incredibly curious. I guess I still am. Does old age temper curiosity?
I was thinking the opposite, the women are less inclined to pure curiosity, not tied to any practical purpose. Men are more philosophical. My interpretation of his quote: Einstein was a philosopher, not a practical man. He knew he was very successful at philosophy, according to history, but he was saying that it wasn’t because he had a talent for it, rather it was because he had a very intense, persistent curiosity.
I completely agree. I think he was a perfectly self-centered man, a moral monster. History has been falsified with respect to this.
No serious scientist challenged special relativity, as far as it went. Einstein himself challenged it from the beginning, because he saw that, as well as it resolved flaws in Newtonian mechanics and successfully incorporated Maxwell’s theory into the Newtonian program for the first time, it held on to the same basic non-relativistic fallacy, just sort of moved it back. That’s why he pressed on to general relativity. All because he had this insatiable curiosity about how the world is.
I disagree. I think he had three in one year (1901)! Special relativity, Brownian motion, and the photo-electric effect, which was the beginning of quantum mechanics. Then fifteen years later, general relativity. There was a race to solve the problem created by special relativity, and came in at least tied for first, or as history has it: he won.
So I think he had at least four big ideas.
There were a number of philosophers, starting with Maxwell, and including Einstein’s mentors* who recognized that science had been on fire since Galileo. The rank and file didn’t know that there was a fire. Einstein lit two more fires with the photo-electric effect (the causality/knowledge problem and the grand unification problem), neither of which he could control.
Apparently very well.
*I forget who they were…it’s been a long time since I studied his life and this history. Maybe these equals who were just a little too old to win the prize included Boltzman, or Lord Kelvin, or Lorenz?? I’m too lazy to look it up. The true history of science isn’t ever taught in the public schools. We are taught fairy tales.
Oh. Well. There you go. All violinists are depraved.
My wife is a substitute teacher (or was back when kids were allowed in school). One thing she complained about, even with the good students, was a lack of curiosity. Kids just want to know the answer, not how to find the answer.
This is a big problem with our educational system. A fundamental purpose of “education”, as the term was once used, is to teach the student how to think.
You have to want to know how to think in order to be educated. So the system is failing, if the intent is to “educate” in that traditional sense.
What should be done to fix this serious societal problem?
Is the problem one of impractical goals (universal education)? Is it necessary or even desirable to have almost everyone educated? If not, how many of us should be and can be educated? And how should we decide who would be educated and who not?
Or is it one of execution? Perhaps it is the teachers, or the teachers’ unions, or the school administrators, or the parents, or the culture, who are responsible for the fact that kids don’t want to think.
I don’t know the answer, even though I’ve thought about it a lot for a long time.
Not for me! I might just be curious about different kinds of things. What about you, @manny?
Not for me either, Susan and Manny. But! The farther in the past the start of this trip, and the closer the end, the less I have invested in learning more, and the more I have invested in teaching what precious little I’ve learned.
I read a recent biography of Einstein a couple of years ago–Isaacson? It was eye-opening. Also there was a TV series, and I thought it was fairly true to the biography.
Fascinating! I’ll have to think about how that might to apply to me, Mark. Then again, I’ve always had the teacher in me!
Perhaps kids have too many passive entertainments in our affluent society that give them an instant, but shallow gratification(?) It started with TV and then video games and after that personal cell phones and now the Internet. Even in music, before the advent of recording devices, one had to learn how to play an instrument in order to reproduce instrumental music, which is a highly interactive, not passive, endeavor. Now that one can instantly hear any music ever recorded at any time of day with the push of a button, there isn’t much incentive to pursue a deeper study of the technique or theory involved to produce it.
It is an extraordinary paradox that a person can become bored in our incredibly complex and varied society. Of course, many people buck this trend, but a heck of a lot don’t. I suspect that in pre-industrialized times, the natural rigors of having to survive prevented one from becoming bored so easily, even though life was much simpler.
@StevenSeward, I think you are on to something, along with @markcamp. When everything seems to be at our fingertips, there is little that will call us to explore or create or learn. It’s all right in front of us! I think both your ideas are a key component of the slip in education from the students’ standpoint, and although we may be born with an innate curiosity, the material world tells us that we have everything, and the education system says we don’t have enough. But instead of creating, being curious, we blame and complain. This is a passive way to engage with the world, empty of hope, promise and learning. There is so much to learn, so much to discover, so much that can be built to make the world a better place. Sigh.
I would differentiate the difference between a true busybody and a life coach is that one is invited, the other is not. I think a life coach reflects a trend in our culture where many lack friends and family who give honest feedback and support. Thus people pay for someone to be an observer and feedback loop to set and accomplish life goals.
The trick is finding a life coach that can support you finding a good, solid path.
Personally, I’m glad my life foundation empowered me to be self-sufficient, and able to have friends and family be my sounding board.
The good thing about employing a life coach is the self-realization that you want something different, and using resources available to make the changes necessary.
I agree with your assessment, @julespa. It’s hard to make life changes on one’s own. My hope is that some point on that coaching journey the client would realize he has the wings to fly on his own.
You might enjoy the book The Other Einstein, which depicts his treatment of his first wife and her possible contributions to his grand ideas.
I think you may have summed it up better than me!